What a shitty place to die. Whatever your feelings about Dallas, that’s a pretty harsh assessment. Then again, the character in Peter Landesman’s well-intentioned but unfulfilling Parkland who says it, an aide to fallen President John F. Kennedy, can probably be forgiven for his snotty Yankee attitude. Next month marks…
Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you’re watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,…
Sunday, along with more than six million Americans, I watched the end of Walter White. I didn’t think I could handle alone the emotional toll of saying goodbye to Breaking Bad, so I decided to head to the Granada Theater to scream cheer with a crowd at three huge screens…
Can you truly separate an artist from his art? Arguments from either side of the question grow inflamed in the case of Orson Scott Card. The author of the much-loved Ender’s Game has done everything possible to submarine the film adaptation’s upcoming box office release — which is a nice…
When a relatively young actor dies suddenly, as James Gandolfini did in June, it’s tempting to wonder about the roles he’ll never get to play. When we didn’t know we’d be losing him so soon, it was always fun to see Gandolfini show up, a casual surprise: In 2012 alone…
It’s 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year’s Formula One World Championship — the embroidered badge on…
Mild spoilers up to The Bridge’s ninth episode below. Artisanal murders are all the rage these days. On Showtime’s Dexter, NBC’s Hannibal, and Fox’s The Following, small-batch, labor-intensive, sold-with-a-story slaughters have become TV’s equivalent of the Cronut. Handsome, intelligent, and mannered as court eunuchs, serial killers have become the new…
To paraphrase the Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He’s already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an exuberant ensemble routine that out-Dr Peppered any Dr Pepper commercial. Then there was his smashing Saturday Night Live re-creation of Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” — like…
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was the go-to screening for teachers during union strikes, rainy recesses or just to grab a smoke break to prevent them from tranforming into the headmaster from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” Even though it is not totally faithful to Roald Dahl’s famous children’s book,…
Teen Wolf – watch more funny videos From concept to execution, Teen Wolf is a positively perfect ’80s film that makes absolutely no sense. Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) has lived in the same town his entire life. When his adolescent hormones shift, he realizes that he’s a werewolf. This…
Continuing their quest to squeeze every single cent from parents nationwide, Disney has decided to re-release The Little Mermaid in select theaters under the billing “Second Screen Live.” What the hell is second screen live? Glad you asked! Second Screen is Disney’s iPad app that invites film watchers to “interact”…
Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson and Michael Sheen as William MastersIn 1957, the same year that The Ed Sullivan Show refused to shoot Elvis below the waist, a gynecologist and a former nightclub singer began hooking strangers up to electrodes and asking them to fuck in the name of science…
If five Oscar nominees lose two young girls in the woods, will their wailing make a sound? That’s the key question of Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve’s prestigious puffery about a father (Hugh Jackman) and a cop (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to catch a kidnapper. Prisoners is a dog-whistle for Academy voters keyed…
Forbidden fruit has never seemed so poisonous than in Thanks for Sharing, a remarkably sensitive and surprisingly romantic ensemble drama about sex addiction. A winsome mix of funny, harrowing and smart, it’s most commendable for making characters who are addicted to bad behavior — and who refuse to blame themselves…
Written, produced, directed, and edited by Rena Riffel, who also reprises her role as Penny from the original Showgirls, Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven has been available on VOD for at least a year, but is now being released on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing, thus conferring onto it the…
Arsenio HallIt’s been 19 years since Arsenio Hall last barked at the camera, and the world has changed. Shoulder pads are passé; (“Unless you play football, you can’t have them anymore,” Hall jokes), hip-hop is mainstream and, after our so-called first black president, the country elected a real one –…
Bernie Su and Hank Green captured the hearts, iPhones, Pinterest pages, Instagram accounts and GetGlue music playlists of teens across America with their 2012 series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which updated Pride and Prejudice to modern life through real-time transmedia storytelling. The series consisted of 9½ hours of content stretched…
“If they made a movie, Holden wouldn’t like it,” Martin Sheen opines deep into the new documentary Salinger. He’s speaking of the possibility of a film adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, a disastrous idea that J.D. Salinger prevented in both life and death. Sheen, of course, could be…
It’s tempting, after watching the exceptional new film Museum Hours, to describe director Jem Cohen’s visual style as chiefly “observational.” The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their…
We’ll always have Iron Man, they must be telling each other in Hollywood. As summer wanes, the hulking corpses of would-be blockbusters litter the home-video distribution channels like fallen Kaiju from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant-’bots-vs.-giant-beasts movie Pacific Rim, the most enjoyable of 2013’s many urban-renewing summer blockbusters. In Del Toro’s…
Understandably, Peter Mayhew is not as well-known as Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill. But W. Ryan Ziegler wants to change that. The first-time filmmaker is now raising money on Kickstarter for Standing in the Stars: The Peter Mayhew Story, a documentary about the 7-foot-3 actor who played Chewbacca in the…
Summer 2013 was a strong season for that oft-maligned genre, the romantic comedy. Excellent films like The Spectacular Now and Drinking Buddies for the most part avoided rom-com cliches, and reinventions like Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing made timeless story lines seem fresh. Still other on-screen romances were held…
